Elon Musk has twice relied on social media polls to make decisions. It’s at best a fig leaf and at worst delusional.
For those seeking input from a large number of people, it is the best of times. It is also very much the worst of times.
The advent of the internet and social media has both made it trivial to cobble together a group of opinions from an audience and created an audience for whatever putative data analysis you might offer. Perhaps you’ve noticed a glut of inexpensive polling from outlets you’ve never heard of. Maybe you’ve noticed the avalanche of news articles informing you that, to make up an example, the favorite ice cream flavor of residents of Kansas is rum raisin, research conducted by the Baskin-Robbins Polling Institute. You can whip up a survey and find an audience for it with all of the ease of filling out an online form.
For those only vaguely interested in the accuracy of what they’re measuring, this is all great. An unprecedented moment for making numbers appear and for putting those numbers in a news release. If, on the other hand, you are concerned about measuring how people actually feel about things? This is pretty grim.
Yes, online panels have expanded the ability of legitimate pollsters to reach people — pollsters who do things like attempt to weight responses to match the composition of the population. But it also means that your precise measurements compete for attention or influence against things that are hopelessly inaccurate, tainted by bias or simply invented.
Which brings us to Elon Musk and his predilection for Twitter polls.
In recent weeks, Musk has outsourced the making of decisions about people banned from Twitter to users of the platform. First, he asked whether former president Donald Trump should be reinstated on the platform, opting to unlock Trump’s account after 52 percent of respondents said he should. Then he asked whether there should be a “general amnesty” for suspended accounts to be reinstated.
